Nearly every tour pro spends more time than you in the gym improving their strength, balance and flexibility in order to compete at the highest level. But what exercises are they doing and what are the most effective exercises you can do to improve your golf game?

During the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, we spoke to Nigel Tilley, one of the physiotherapists on the European Tour Physio unit. Nigel deals with European Tour players on a weekly basis and has an in-depth understanding of how golfers can maximize performance through an effective strength and conditioning programme. Here’s what he had to say…

“I often get asked: “What are the best three gym exercises I can do to improve my golf?”

Firstly this depends on your physical characteristics. Are you hyper mobile or stiff, strong or weak? A lot of these things would have an implication on what exercises might be best for you.

One thing we do encourage people to do is exercises that don’t look like the golf swing. A common mistake people make is doing lots of rotation exercises and trying to move heavy weight in the same pattern as the golf swing, when actually there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that isn’t the right thing to do.

I would encourage you to generally increase the foundation of strength in the legs, pelvis, hips and trunk through exercises like squats, deadlifts, pushes and pulls. I’d also look to encourage people to resist movement like rotation, side flexion and extension.

One example of an exercise would be a Pallof press. This uses a resistance bands, most good gyms will have these, attached to a wall. Bring tension onto the resistance band, take the band away from you by pushing your hands out away from your body. This increases the lever and the band wants you to rotate back the other way but you are resisting the rotation. This can be modified or progressed to make it more difficult if required.

Squats are a great exercise that work different areas of the body, particularly the trunk in keeping an upright position using the back extensors, and also the big powerful muscles of the quads and the gluts, which are really important in the golf swing.

They also help you develop the ability to get a ground reaction force – so how much you can push into the floor and what the floor gives back to you. Again, this is really important for the golf swing.

Start without a weight, squatting down onto a chair or bench. To add weight to make it more difficult, you can do a goblet squat while holding a kettlebell at your chest, or use a barbell across the front of your shoulders.

The last exercise I’d recommend is called a dead squat, which is the combination of a deadlift and a squat and it uses something called a trap bar, which is a great piece of equipment for golfers. It helps you put lots of load through the squat movement pattern without putting too much force through the lower back.